10 Areas to be Tracked Both Nationally and in Every State and Community during the COVID-19 Pandemic

During the 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic, the CDC produced a weekly dashboard of the most important interventions, objectively grading each in every affected country as red, yellow or green. For Ebola, interventions were in five domains: command and control, surveillance and epidemiology, case management (including laboratory testing), essential health services, and effective communication.

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The dashboard focused attention on interventions most likely to stop the epidemic. With COVID-19, the same five domains are essential. Two additional domains to fight COVID-19 are physical distancing and providing social and economic support. Here’s a starter set of 10 areas to be tracked both nationally and in every state and community:

  1. A well-organized emergency management system with empowered incident managers aligned with political leaders.

  2. Testing available for every patient with pneumonia within four hours, every symptomatic person within 12 hours, and capacity for drive-through testing.

  3. Start contact tracing within hours of case identification; identify contacts for >95 percent of cases, track >95 percent of contacts, test 100 percent of symptomatic contacts, and monitor >95 percent of quarantined contacts for 14 days. This is an enormous undertaking, and both trained people and practical digital tools will be essential. China tracked 700,000 contacts — with fewer cases than the U.S. has.

  4. Provide daily briefings with accurate and timely numbers of those infected, ill and deceased, epidemiologic trends and analysis, along with updated guidance from credible spokespeople.

  5. Protect health care workers with policies, training, and personal protective equipment.

  6. Be sure health care systems can safely surge for large numbers of mildly ill patients, a large increase in patients needing intensive care, and patients needing ongoing, non-coronavirus-related care.

  7. Be able to resume targeted or general physical distancing rapidly if needed.

  8. Support nutrition, learning, mental and physical health and well-being, and social needs during isolation and quarantine.

  9. Engage communities, obtaining information through surveys, assessing adherence to physical distancing recommendations, and using findings of these surveys to improve the effectiveness and reduce the disruption of measures taken.

  10. Coordinate with states and localities so guidance and policies are implemented within 24 hours of publication.

You can read my full piece on this topic in The Hill here: https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/489887-well-lose-world-war-c-against-the-coronavirus-if-we-dont-fight-the-right